The Old Woman and the Eagle by Idries Shah

In this amusing story, an old woman encounters an eagle for the first time. Perplexed by its unfamiliar appearance, she insists that it must be a pigeon and tries to make it so. Her efforts mirror a common pattern of human thought: altering the unfamiliar to make it acceptable. This tale is one of a series specially presented for children by the Afghan author Idries Shah, who, for more than 30 years, collected stories from the Sufi tradition and adapted them to contemporary Western culture. Told since ancient times throughout Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Middle East, such tales are used by Sufis to foster greater mental flexibility and insight in young and old alike.

Idries Shah (1924-1996), whose family lived in Afghanistan for a thousand years, is an internationally known authority on the region and his books on Sufism are considered seminal. "The Sufis," first published in 1964, is a first-of-its-kind modern statement on Sufism. Shah is the author of more than twenty books and has a readership spanning East and West.

ForeWord Reviews

After another eagle helps to bend back his beak and comb his feathers back up, they fly off with a final comment, “There are a lot of silly people in the world who think that pigeons are eagles, or that eagles are pigeons, or that all sorts of things are other things.” Although children often pre...